Archives for August 2005

We at Campbell Cohen wish to welcome you to the New CICNewsletter! We have been burning the midnight oil here at our offices in an effort to revamp CICNews.com. We’ll be overhauling the website over the course of the next few months in order to bring to our audience a fresh, more comprehensive view of the daily, weekly and monthly happenings in the Canadian Immigration industry.

As you can see the CICNewsletter has been updated and is now offered in two distinct flavors, HTML or plain text. What’s the difference? well, one looks like a web page albeit in your email inbox, the other is formatted as simple text. To those of you who are regular readers of the CICNewsletter you are already familiar with our plain text version since it is the only version we had made available up until now. The HTML version is, in it’s basic form, a better looking way to present content to our readers. Links are “clickable”, images are now directly embedded into the email itself, and layout and content is formatted as it would be in a regular web page you would come across while surfing the internet.

If you are a qualified professional or tradesperson, you may be wondering about how you will continue to work in your occupation after you arrive in Canada. Occupations in Canada can be divided into two general groups: regulated and un-regulated.

Although approximately 80% of jobs in Canada are unregulated, there are many cases where restrictions to practicing a profession occur. The first step in determining if your occupation is regulated can be to contact the professional association or regulatory body for your occupation in your country of origin. Many Canadian professional associations have made agreements with other countries to grant some equivalency of credentials.

The next step is to contact the Provincial or Territorial association responsible for your occupation in the region of Canada where you intend to settle. Regulated occupations often have a Provincial or Territorial association responsible for the recognition of qualifications to work in that field. Canadians and non-Canadians alike must meet the requirements of the regulatory body before taking up a job in that occupation. Persons who meet the standards of a regulated profession must acquire licence or register with the relevant Canadian association.

Although the process of recognizing your qualifications will depend on your occupation and where in Canada you intend to work, usually an assessment of your training, experience and skills will take place. The specific fees, timelines and procedures can vary greatly, so investigate your profession in Canada as early as possible and be prepared to start the next stage of your career.

Meyer Burnstein a 20 year veteran of Canadian immigration policies has drafted a high-level CIC document that Lexbase believes will be the “road map of operational changes to come”.

The document introduces provincial opportunities for increased federal support regarding the entrance of “low-skilled” labour, and facilitates work permits to foreign workers who are destined to cities other than Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.

The policies proposed under the new legislation if approved will include changes to the current management practices for temporary and permanent migration by way of “direct volumetric controls”. This means that new “quotas” will be added to the list of managed immigration admittance criteria. “direct volumetric controls” takes its form as a balanced dispensation that alters the weight given to various permanent and temporary entrant classes assuming the distribution of source countries.

To address the political challenges that result from immigration as it relates to national security, Canada and the US persist in the “harmonization” of their border security procedures in an effort to jointly strenghten and safeguard common national interests.

Harmonization in this context will mean attuning both respective countries’ external visa regimes, treatment of carriers and asylees, standardizing migrant rights, and integrating asylum, detention, removal procedures control, and humanitarian policies. To properly address these issues there will be greater effort appointed to building stronger links with affected communities. We should expect a gradual accension of various procedures leading ultimately to a Canada-US co-management of significant parts of the Canadian immigration industry.

Nigeria currently faces a devastating food crisis. Drought and an invasion of desert locusts have caused substancial shortages in both crops and grazing land, causing a 225,000-tonne grain deficiency in the 2004–2005 harvest that threatens close to 3,000 villages, and affects some 3.5 million people in the region.

Canada, through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), has provided a total of $18.6 million to help fight malnutrition and hunger in the Sahel region of Africa (Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal and Mauritania).

The plight in Nigeria has tugged at the heartstrings of many people across our great nation. The Canadian Visa office, located in Lagos, assists Nigerians who want to come to Canada to study or work temporarily. Nigerians wanting to immigrate to Canada must contact the immigration section of the Canadian High Commission in Accra, Ghana.

Question: The skilled worker application asks what city the applicant plans to settle in. If the applicant is subsequently selected, is he/she obliged to settle initially in that city?

Answer: Once you enter Canada as a Permanent Resident, you will be able to live anywhere you wish inside of Canada’s borders regardless of the initial settlement response you submitted through your application for Permanent Residency. As a Canadian Permanent Resident, you are guaranteed a basic right of “mobility” under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms States clearly in Section 6.2 that:

Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a Permanent Resident of Canada has the right

a) to move to and take up residence in any province; and
b) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.

Do you qualify for immigration?

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